MSDYNGP development team blog post on what they talked about at the roadshow 2014

First let me introduce myself, my name is Kevin Racer and I’m a Senior Program Manager Lead on the Microsoft Dynamics GP team. I spend my days working on improving our architecture and tools. Over the last several months we’ve been looking closely at our architecture in order to understand how it can deliver against the rapidly changing technological landscape of today and the foreseeable future. I think we all recognize the impact Cloud computing has had and will have in the future. In answer to that challenge we’ve begun work on a fundamental transformation of the GP architecture to be more service based. At this point we are terming it our “Service Based Architecture” feature. We initially showed a prototype of the architecture at our September Technical Airlift in Fargo and will begin to discuss this in greater depth with our partners on our upcoming seven city partner GP NOW & NEXT roadshow in February. We will also leverage it to support parts of our Convergence future demos in the general session.

The Service Based Architecture, codenamed DexNext, is slated for release in calendar Q42 of 2014 and we are well on our way in developing the components that make up this major feature. The Service Based Architecture has at its core two new capabilities. First it will enable Partners and ISVs to expose sanScript based logic as a service call. What I mean by that, simply put is any logic in any GP dictionary can now be accessed externally as a web service through a new procedure type called a Service Procedure. This is different than our current Web Service model where the logic is duplicated in SQL. This is the sansScript logic, executing in the dictionary runtime.

Secondly, to better support these new service calls as well as simplify the calling of other services we are deepening our sanScript level integration to .NET. Developers will now be able to create and use .NET classes and objects within the runtime model. This enables them to more fully leverage the windows platform as well as pass complex data structures to service consumers such as companion applications, Azure services and any other service oriented application.

The Service Based Architecture broadens our ability to interact with the Cloud, provides a connective base for companion application development and greatly broadens our ability to think big about the future of Dynamics GP and the functionality we can begin to build and offer. Keep watching this blog and others for more details and if you’re a MSDYNGP Partner I’d encourage you to attend one of our GP NOW & NEXT events.